The Dresden Dolls - The Dresden Dolls
Release: September 26, 2003 (initial released)
April 27, 2004 (Roadrunner Records)
July 13, 2005 (Roadrunner Records Japan)
Genre: Alternative
Label: 8ft. Records (original release), Roadrunner Records (re-issue)
Length: 56:53
Nick's Rating: 3/5
Fuckin' A, I hate so many things that make 'obscure' music popular. As a for-instance, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and games like that, all include 80% your standard fare in terms of guitar rockers, then they include one or two numbers that are slightly obscure that everyone latches on to and plays non-stop. Not that most of them aren't good, but now every pissant teenage Metallica-lover knows Voivod as if they were joined at the hip, and Judas Priest's "Painkiller" is the second-most-played Priest song on last.fm.
Almost as bad, or perhaps even worse, to me, are those people who like to call themselves 'nonconformists' and who all listen to the same shit. If you brought this to their attention, they'd probably call it irony, and be quick to explain to you that they didn't learn the word from Alanis Morrisette like half of America did. I've met a fair few of them, many of whom have given me music suggestions -- probably because I look a mess, wear black shirts, and don't listen to the radio. Of course, they neglect to note that the black shirts are my torso-covering of choice because they tend to have my preferred musical billboard emblazoned on them (Pink Floyd, Rush, Motorhead, you get the picture) and I don't listen to the radio because a) most songs I like are album cuts and often too long for radio play, and b) your average radio DJ tends to jabber like an idiot given so much as five seconds air time. They then proceed to torture us with whatever they feel like, from middle-of-the-road rock-and-roll wannabes to random tapes of mutually ego-stroking interviews. One time, a radio DJ actually aired a mashup of "Enter Sandman" and "Don't Stop Believin'" -- I wish I could make this up. I can't. He played a fucking mashup of fucking "Enter Sandman" and fucking "Don't Stop Believin'." I can't stop swearing and I think I'm going into spasms. I need to stop writing about this.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the so-called nonconformists. Well, one of them (who, incidentally, loves System of a Down and Metallica and Rush on top of his depressive shit) told me to listen to the Dresden Dolls (without even so much as lending me a CD, naturally), so I did. I found their two albums and one EP and found them all to be about average. The fact that they're as popular as they are is utterly staggering. It may just be because Amanda Palmer, lead singer and pianist for the duo, asserts that her middle name is "Fucking" (how hip! how edgy!), they appeared just on time to fill in the void of good music for goth kids left by three years' delay since The Cure's last album, the fact that their next just wasn't enough like either of the two Pornography trilogies (Seventeen Seconds-Faith-Pornography or Pornography-Disintegration-Bloodflowers), and because they were signed to Roadrunner Records for some reason; Roadrunner Records is a metal-centric label that also distributed Within Temptation and has, since adding Amanda Palmer and her drumming sex poppet Brian Viglione (I had to look up the spelling on that one), Megadeth, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Airbourne, Trivium, and DragonForce. They don't seem to care about the music so much as being hip and trendy (which explains the Dresden Dolls being on their label), and their continuous cash grabs (Did you hear about them wanting to digitally re-edit a Palmer DVD to make her look thinner? Whoo! Unfortuate implications ahoy!) make them seem like a particularly unfunny Ed, Edd n Eddy episode, but instead of jawbreakers, their quest is the total domination of rock music.
Well, it's either that that's to blame, or their presence at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 2002.
Regardless, the record itself is, well... modestly good, anyway. It's very even, and most of the lyrics are kind of funny, if not outright cute... sometimes, I can't tell if there's irony to be found or not in a place like the bridge of "Coin-Operated Boy," where Amanda, after having espoused the joys of having a coin-operated lover, tells us that it's to hammer in the despair... but it's clearly just a jokey song about how much better a sex toy is than a real man. Is this one of those Gary Cherone moments where she's actually mocking these people? You can call bullshit on this one as many times as you want, IT IS POSSIBLE! Yes, it's fully, FULLY possible that she fucking with us and telling us that people who are that sexual have problems with them and are constantly in despair and-- yeah, okay, you're right, that's a stupid idea. With its origins in cabaret, the music of the duo DOES have quotas to fill in the sexuality department.
Better than that song, though (while "Coin-Operated Boy" is a nice, harmless song, it's basically just a jokey monologue over a sparse backing track), is the lead single (shockingly, this album did have associated singles...) "Girl Anachronism," which resembles a moderately fast rocker, but trades guitar for piano, giving it something approaching an interesting sound. The lyrics aren't greatly interesting (Palmer lamenting that she was born in the wrong time -- what, making that kind of music? No shit?), but they're reasonably amusing, which gives it a few points. Of course, most of the whole album is pretty amusing in a sick, perverted way, which seems to be the only way Palmer knows how to be (cf. the "Evelyn Evelyn" project, wherein she and another perform as, apparently, a pair of conjoined twins in a circus who apparently had been involved in child pornography, or something else kind of stupid like that... which resulted in backlash from everyone ever aimed at everyone else).
A review I read of the album somewhere once began to intimate that this was a musical revolution of sorts, or at least that Palmer and Viglione (please don't make me ever have to spell that again) were originals. I guess, yeah, but they're so overrated as such. On this album, on Yes, Virginia..., on No, Virginia..., they seem to have a consistent problem of not getting the balance right. It's kind of heartbreaking, too; they seem like they could be so good if they'd just strike a freakin' balance between their black humor, their quirkiness, and decent songwriting, which comes and goes a little too quickly for my tastes. It makes perfect sense why hipster 'non-conformists' would latch onto this type of music, but it's just... not done well enough in many cases.
One last thing: next person who mentions that they're "Brechtian punk cabaret" to me is going to cause my head to explode. "Brechtian punk cabaret," Palmer's description of the musical genre, is a fake genre, which she devised to dodge being called "goth." Hilariously, most of the people who bought her record are probably exactly the people who buy every other record that gets called "goth." So much for that plan, miss Palmer. Is that why you wrote "Backstabber?" This reasoning is probably the same that Emilie Autumn used when she came upon "Victoriandustrial" (to keep faux-goth kids who wouldn't understand the music or the pain from buying it) -- and in a cruel twist, you can find that at Hot Topic. No word on the Dolls' material, but then again, it's not like I actually like any of their records enough to even consider buying them.
Nick's Rating: 3/5
Fuckin' A, I hate so many things that make 'obscure' music popular. As a for-instance, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and games like that, all include 80% your standard fare in terms of guitar rockers, then they include one or two numbers that are slightly obscure that everyone latches on to and plays non-stop. Not that most of them aren't good, but now every pissant teenage Metallica-lover knows Voivod as if they were joined at the hip, and Judas Priest's "Painkiller" is the second-most-played Priest song on last.fm.
Almost as bad, or perhaps even worse, to me, are those people who like to call themselves 'nonconformists' and who all listen to the same shit. If you brought this to their attention, they'd probably call it irony, and be quick to explain to you that they didn't learn the word from Alanis Morrisette like half of America did. I've met a fair few of them, many of whom have given me music suggestions -- probably because I look a mess, wear black shirts, and don't listen to the radio. Of course, they neglect to note that the black shirts are my torso-covering of choice because they tend to have my preferred musical billboard emblazoned on them (Pink Floyd, Rush, Motorhead, you get the picture) and I don't listen to the radio because a) most songs I like are album cuts and often too long for radio play, and b) your average radio DJ tends to jabber like an idiot given so much as five seconds air time. They then proceed to torture us with whatever they feel like, from middle-of-the-road rock-and-roll wannabes to random tapes of mutually ego-stroking interviews. One time, a radio DJ actually aired a mashup of "Enter Sandman" and "Don't Stop Believin'" -- I wish I could make this up. I can't. He played a fucking mashup of fucking "Enter Sandman" and fucking "Don't Stop Believin'." I can't stop swearing and I think I'm going into spasms. I need to stop writing about this.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the so-called nonconformists. Well, one of them (who, incidentally, loves System of a Down and Metallica and Rush on top of his depressive shit) told me to listen to the Dresden Dolls (without even so much as lending me a CD, naturally), so I did. I found their two albums and one EP and found them all to be about average. The fact that they're as popular as they are is utterly staggering. It may just be because Amanda Palmer, lead singer and pianist for the duo, asserts that her middle name is "Fucking" (how hip! how edgy!), they appeared just on time to fill in the void of good music for goth kids left by three years' delay since The Cure's last album, the fact that their next just wasn't enough like either of the two Pornography trilogies (Seventeen Seconds-Faith-Pornography or Pornography-Disintegration-Bloodflowers), and because they were signed to Roadrunner Records for some reason; Roadrunner Records is a metal-centric label that also distributed Within Temptation and has, since adding Amanda Palmer and her drumming sex poppet Brian Viglione (I had to look up the spelling on that one), Megadeth, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Airbourne, Trivium, and DragonForce. They don't seem to care about the music so much as being hip and trendy (which explains the Dresden Dolls being on their label), and their continuous cash grabs (Did you hear about them wanting to digitally re-edit a Palmer DVD to make her look thinner? Whoo! Unfortuate implications ahoy!) make them seem like a particularly unfunny Ed, Edd n Eddy episode, but instead of jawbreakers, their quest is the total domination of rock music.
Well, it's either that that's to blame, or their presence at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in 2002.
Regardless, the record itself is, well... modestly good, anyway. It's very even, and most of the lyrics are kind of funny, if not outright cute... sometimes, I can't tell if there's irony to be found or not in a place like the bridge of "Coin-Operated Boy," where Amanda, after having espoused the joys of having a coin-operated lover, tells us that it's to hammer in the despair... but it's clearly just a jokey song about how much better a sex toy is than a real man. Is this one of those Gary Cherone moments where she's actually mocking these people? You can call bullshit on this one as many times as you want, IT IS POSSIBLE! Yes, it's fully, FULLY possible that she fucking with us and telling us that people who are that sexual have problems with them and are constantly in despair and-- yeah, okay, you're right, that's a stupid idea. With its origins in cabaret, the music of the duo DOES have quotas to fill in the sexuality department.
Better than that song, though (while "Coin-Operated Boy" is a nice, harmless song, it's basically just a jokey monologue over a sparse backing track), is the lead single (shockingly, this album did have associated singles...) "Girl Anachronism," which resembles a moderately fast rocker, but trades guitar for piano, giving it something approaching an interesting sound. The lyrics aren't greatly interesting (Palmer lamenting that she was born in the wrong time -- what, making that kind of music? No shit?), but they're reasonably amusing, which gives it a few points. Of course, most of the whole album is pretty amusing in a sick, perverted way, which seems to be the only way Palmer knows how to be (cf. the "Evelyn Evelyn" project, wherein she and another perform as, apparently, a pair of conjoined twins in a circus who apparently had been involved in child pornography, or something else kind of stupid like that... which resulted in backlash from everyone ever aimed at everyone else).
A review I read of the album somewhere once began to intimate that this was a musical revolution of sorts, or at least that Palmer and Viglione (please don't make me ever have to spell that again) were originals. I guess, yeah, but they're so overrated as such. On this album, on Yes, Virginia..., on No, Virginia..., they seem to have a consistent problem of not getting the balance right. It's kind of heartbreaking, too; they seem like they could be so good if they'd just strike a freakin' balance between their black humor, their quirkiness, and decent songwriting, which comes and goes a little too quickly for my tastes. It makes perfect sense why hipster 'non-conformists' would latch onto this type of music, but it's just... not done well enough in many cases.
One last thing: next person who mentions that they're "Brechtian punk cabaret" to me is going to cause my head to explode. "Brechtian punk cabaret," Palmer's description of the musical genre, is a fake genre, which she devised to dodge being called "goth." Hilariously, most of the people who bought her record are probably exactly the people who buy every other record that gets called "goth." So much for that plan, miss Palmer. Is that why you wrote "Backstabber?" This reasoning is probably the same that Emilie Autumn used when she came upon "Victoriandustrial" (to keep faux-goth kids who wouldn't understand the music or the pain from buying it) -- and in a cruel twist, you can find that at Hot Topic. No word on the Dolls' material, but then again, it's not like I actually like any of their records enough to even consider buying them.
Note to self, start reviewing more records you properly like.
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